Utah Jazz: Re-Selecting the Last 15 NBA Drafts

With the 2016 NBA Draft just around the corner, here’s a look at the Utah Jazz’s draft selections–and who they probably should’ve chosen in hindsight–over the last 15 years.

The NBA Draft has given us its fair share of first round busts over the years, but also several second round gems. With so much in question about prospects on draft day and no specific science to measure which players will live up to their potential and which won’t, it’s no surprise that the draft can often be such a mixed bag.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop fans from looking back and criticizing a team’s poor draft decisions years after the fact. Of course, this is always much easier to do in hindsight. And given the nature of the draft, where so much is left up to chance, they really aren’t fair criticisms.

One can search the web analyzing mock drafts, checking out the NBA Big Board or watching player film, but the truth of the matter is that you never really know what you’re going to get until a player has a few years of NBA experience under his belt.

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Yet Utah Jazz fans have definitely been quick to bash some of the team’s poor draft choices over the years. While I don’t necessarily agree with this being a fair criticism since every team has had their share of both bad and (let’s be honest) lucky picks, it is interesting to think about who the Jazz could have ended up with had they made different selections in several drafts.

With the 2016 NBA Draft just days away, I decided to take a stroll down memory lane and look at the team’s last 15 years worth of draft picks as well as who, in hindsight, they probably should have taken each year.

Of course, it’s possible that if the Jazz had selected differently, it would have affected the order in which they selected in subsequent years, thus throwing all this crazy speculation (and perhaps the very fabric of the universe) out of wack.

However, for our purposes, we’ll be looking at the Jazz’s picks (and at what number they picked them) on a strictly hypothetical, year-by-year basis with the picks they actually had and who was still available that would have been better for them to select (and the number that they were actually selected at).

Without further ado, let’s get started.

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